The Principle of Force

Now I still remember that I am supposed to write on the Principle of Force in performing magic. Before I begin, let me quote myself once again that “the principle of force as the word implies, forces the audience to make a selection that is predetermined by the magician himself”. Another way of saying that is that the magician forces the audience to choose what the magician wants while giving the audience the illusion that he (the audience) is the one who makes the choice. There are many ways to execute a “force”. No matter which way it is done, a force is always based on one of these principles: the use of gimmicks, sleight of hands and verbal manipulation.

For today’s article, I will begin by what is known as “The Magician’s Choice”. This is one of the most basic lessons a magician has to learn to perform magic tricks. The Magician’s Choice is done merely by verbal manipulation although not all verbal manipulation in the performing of a magic trick necessarily constitutes a force.

The Magician’s Choice

In executing a Magician’s Choice, the magician will ask the audience to choose between 2 choices. These choices could be in the form of objects, words, or anything imaginable. However it is easier to illustrate here by referring to these choices as objects.

Say for example, the magician divide a deck of cards into 2 piles which I will refer to them here as the first and the second pile. Let’s say that the magician knows that the card that he wants to reveal at the end of the magic trick is in the first pile. In order to show that everything is done randomly and the final outcome is magical, he allows the audience to choose one of the 2 piles. The simplest statement the magician could say to the audience would be, “Choose one of the two piles.” If the audience chooses the first pile (which is the desired pile), the magician will take the first pile as chosen by the audience and continue with his routine and finally reveals the desired card in the “chosen” pile eventually. On the other hand, if the audience has chosen the second pile, then the magician will take the second pile and discard it by putting it aside. After discarding the second pile that the audience had chosen, the magician now picks up the first pile (which is the desired pile) and continues as in the first scenario.

Notice that the secret lies in what the magician says. He merely asked the audience to choose a pile of cards. But he did not ask the audience what audience want to do with the chosen pile of cards nor did he commit himself to saying what he (the magician) is going to do with the chosen pile of cards. The idea here is being vague with what he says. The magician never commits himself to what he is going to do.

Nasty Audiences

Now can anything go wrong in performing this routine? Yes! Especially if you are performing magic tricks to your friends and it is not an official magic show. In a magic show where you are the professional magician and the audience are usually strangers, they will show more respect to the performer and will not so called, “try to be funny with you” and try to ‘spoil’ your show and embarrass you. Even so, some professional magicians do experience uncooperative audience who try to be funny in more informal settings such as a close-up magic in a bar. So when you are performing magic tricks informally to friends, they tend to have a mindset to sabotage you, spoil your show or do whatever they can to figure out how you do your magic trick.

So now, how do the audience sabotage the magician? I believe that you probably know how to do that too and probably will be very guilty as you have done that very often to friends who performed magic tricks to you. Nevertheless, let me mention 2 very common scenarios here.

Scenario 1: “I want to change my mind”

After either the audience has chosen the first pile or the magician has discarded the second pile that the audience has chosen, the audience will say,

“Oh wait! Can I change my mind?”

“What if I change my mind? Would it make a difference if I have chosen the other pile?”

The audience may not have said all that, but just one of those things or anything to that effect. So now what should the magician do. Do you supposed that the magician is supposed to say,

“No! You can’t change your mind. You have already made your choice and that is final.”

A tug-of-war will occur between the magician and the audience and the whole magic trick is destroyed. Let me tell you what. The magician will be very pissed if this happens. There is only one conclusion. The audience is trying to be nasty. He will vow to himself that he will never show another magic trick to this person ever again.

Scenario 2: “I will decide for you what you are to do.”

In this other scenario, after either the audience had chosen the first pile or the magician had discarded the second pile that the audience had chosen, the audience would insist on what he (the audience) wants to do with the pile of cards he had chosen. If the audience had chosen the second pile of cards and the magician discarded the chosen pile, he would insist that the magician take the second pile that he has chosen. If the audience had chosen the first pile and the magician picked up the first pile that the audience had chosen, the audience would insist that the magician discard away the first pile or the audience insist on holding on to the first pile that he had chosen instead of giving it to the magician. In short, the audience will insist on forcing the magician to do the opposite of what the magician wants do.

Knowing Who To Stay Away From

How do I know? As a hobbyist (a non-professional magician), I perform magic tricks to my friends frequently and I have experienced this many times. This is not meant to be a complaint here but to point out that it is useful to test out your performance first before you actually put on the real show. These annoying audiences will prepare you for the real thing and at the same time it teaches you who to avoid performing magic tricks to in real life. Don’t entertain these smart asses who are unappreciative. Talking about unappreciative audience, avoid such people at all cost. This kind of people who are all out to examine you as if they have set an examination for you to take or they are the police officers interrogating you as a suspect. They have forgotten that you are giving them a free entertainment. They will want to examine all your props and if possible strip search you. They will disrupt you in your routine and dictate to you how you should carry out your routine. And in the event that you manage to survive all the ordeals and still perform a miraculous ending, they will say things like, “I don’t believe that you can really read my mind. Surely there is a trick in it.” Of course there is a trick in it because it is a magic trick, not sorcery or witchcraft. And of course I am supposed to look like I can read your mind and not really read your mind. That’s why I am only a magician, not a wizard or sorcerer. If I am truly a mind reader, I would rather read somebody else’s mind who has more value and not yours. Some others might tell you that they have not seen such a magic trick before and therefore it is not a magic trick to them. They will insist that you should be pulling a rabbit out of a hat or saw a lady in half in order to call it a magic trick. Just tell yourself that these people are absolutely not worth your time and effort. They don’t deserve to be entertained as an audience. They should be abducted and chained up like monkeys by some aliens and made to perform like monkeys to the aliens. That is what I call ENTERTAINMENT!

Fine Tuning The Magician’s Choice

Alright! After that big side step, let’s get back to how to prevent those two nasty scenarios described above from occurring. A professional magician who is experienced will pre-empt something similar to the above two scenarios to happen. Therefore, he would qualify his words and actions a little more in order to seal off objections that may arise later. In using verbal manipulation, you need to gather enough experience to handle objections before they arise. How can this be done?

To avoid scenario 1, after the audience has chosen the first or second pile of cards, the magician could say, “Do you want to change your mind? Is that final? Now, notice that you could have changed your mind but you didn’t (or did). You could have chosen the other pile but you have decided to choose this pile.” All these are said so that the audience could no longer go back on his choice. At the same time, the magician elaborate at great length that the whole process was absolutely random and the audience was absolutely free in making his choice.

To avoid scenario 2, the magician could have chosen to be a little more specific in his instructions instead of being too vague. Let me elaborate on this point. When I first learned the Magician’s Force, I was taught to use the statement, “choose this or that”. More often than not, I encountered scenario 2. The open-endedness of the statement “… choose …” is left to too much interpretation and room for argument. So instead of just say, “choose”, it is better to instruct the audience to do something without any specification of what it is leading to. In our example of 2 piles of cards here, the magician could have said, “pick up a pile of cards”. If the audience pick up the first pile of card, then the magician will ask the audience to hand the pile of card to him (magician). If the audience picks up the second pile of card, then the magician will continue to instruct the audience to put that pile of cards aside elsewhere.

So now you may ask, which approach should I use then since I wouldn’t know which scenario will I encounter. I would suggest that you use the approach in scenario 2. And just in case the audience would say that he wants to change his mind after you have given the second instruction, it would be good to ask audience whether he wants to change his mind after he has picked up a pile of cards before giving him a second instruction such as “hand the pile of cards to me”.

Conclusion

That’s more than enough for today’s post on the Magician’s Choice. In my next post, I teach a simple magic trick that shows you how to apply the Magician’s Force.

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You may want to watch it several times and ask yourself why did the volunteer failed to detect what Slydini was doing. Could you have succeeded in doing what Slydini did? Very often when I was taught a magic trick, I would have a lot of objections as to what if the audiences notice what I am doing? ‘What if the audiences do this or that? As I was watching this video, I asked myself, “Why the volunteer did not lift his head as Slydini flipped his hand upwards to throw the paper ball over his head?” These are the answers I came up with for myself after watching the video repeatedly.

1. Slydini had mastered the distance between the volunteer and himself where the angle of the volunteer’s vision had been greatly restricted.

2. Slydini had confidently got the volunteer fixated on his left palm where he had him believed the paper ball was to be.

3. Slydini successfully fooled him again and again causing the volunteer to doubt himself.

4. Finally, Slydini has mastered the art of misdirection; he knew what he was doing and what he was capable of. Thus, every movement of his body coordinated very well with what he wanted to accomplish. In the case if anyone else would try to imitate Slydini, they may not succeed because their lack of practice or lack of confidence may betray them.

Observe that Slydini had purposely put a lot of paper napkins on the volunteer’s lap restricting his body movement. The volunteer was unable to stand up or move his legs. Otherwise, all the paper napkins would fall from his lap. Slydini then said to the volunteer, “Come closer. No, no, not your chair, yourself. Don’t stand up. Just come closer.” What Slydini had done was to make the volunteer leaned forward and had him looking down with his head bent. Slydini further conditioned him by holding his hands in front of the volunteer at his chest level. Observe that the volunteer was bending his head and body very low. For him to lift up his head to watch Slydini throwing the paper ball over his head would require a big body movement involving not just his head but his back as well. Lifting his head alone would not enable him to see the paper ball thrown over his head.

Next, Slydini had engaged him deeply with his hand movement and conversation drawing his attention to his left hand. Slydini’s head and body were all bent leaning towards his left hand suggesting to everyone in communion with him to focus on his left hand. As he threw the paper ball away, he did it in one swift motion. Only his finger did the job but not his arm.

If I had taken over Slydini’s position, I might have lifted my right arm slowly because I would be afraid that by flinging the paper ball away with one quick fling, the volunteer would have suspected what I was doing. What I would have done next would be to throw the ball away when I was sure that the volunteer did not look up towards my right hand. This would precisely have given me away because the volunteer would have looked up when he did not see my right hand come down to put the paper ball into my left hand fast enough the way Slydini did it. Slydini was able to fling the ball away swiftly because he had the momentum as he lifted up his right arm quickly. In my case if I were to lift up my right arm slowly (hesitantly) and stop, I would lose the momentum. And if I were to throw the ball away, my arm would most probably move also causing the volunteer to grow suspicious.

Notice again that Slydini repeated his routine again and again with slight variation each time. I have pointed this out in the earlier videos. Also notice that the first time he made the paper ball disappeared, he made the volunteer checked his breast pocket. So subsequently when Slydini put the third paper ball into his breast pocket, the volunteer did not suspect anything.

I hope that this series of Slydini videos illustrate how misdirection works. Continue to ask yourself everyday how am I to carry out misdirection to the people around me as to what I want to do. When you plan your performance for a magic trick, ask yourself what misdirection have I incorporated to improve the effect of my performance. Gradually you will find yourself becoming a master of misdirection yourself.

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 In this blog, I intend to share what I have learned about magic. The types of magic, where to learn magic, the process of learning magic and how to perform magic.

If you intend to learn magic, you will first have to choose what kind of magic do you want to learn and perform. Weird as it may sound, there are people who only intend to learn but not perform them. These are merely curiosity seekers who are merely interested in the know-hows, or perhaps worse, people who seek to expose tricks where professional magicians spend their time and money to learn, and perform to earn their living. On the other hand, it could be hobbyists who love magic but are too busy to put in the necessary time to master the tricks well enough in order to perform them.

Enough said! As an introduction to those who are new to magic, magics are categorised into the following:

(1) Stage magic are magics performed on a stage to a big audience easily from a number of 50 to hundreds. We are largely familiar with such magic when we first watched magic shows broadcasted on television. Such acts rely heavily on props and more often than not, require a stage assistant. Some common props are the magic wand, hats, doves and rings. Hypnotism followed by levitation and sawing of a lady assistant are common stage magic we have witnessed since childhood.

(2) Close-up magic are performed to a very small number of audience most suitably on a one-to-one basis. Unlike stage magic where the magician is kept at a distance high up on a stage, far away from the audience, there is a lot of interaction between the magician and the audience in a close-up magic. A close-up magician is usually engaged by organisers of dinner-and-dance or a cocktail party to entertain the guests. The magician would have to walk around and mingle with the guests, strike up conversation with them and entertain them with magic. This is the kind of magic that non-professional or hobbyists are interested in learning. Being a hobbyist myself, we are not seeking to perform magic for a living except to entertain ourselves and our friends. However I would not deny that at a certain point in time, a hobbyist may have refined his/her skills well enough to perform them in public.

(3) Parlour magic is quite similar to close-up magic except that it is meant for a slightly bigger crowd of 10 to 20 audience. The magic tricks employed could be those used for close-up magic as well. The difference depends very much on how the magician manage his/her audience.

(4) Street magic as it is called are magic tricks performed to strangers on the street. In performing street magic, you may approach just one stranger one-to-one or perhaps a group of people. In the process, you may even attract a big crowd. The magic tricks employed are usually that of close-up magic. In the event that you manage to attract a big crowd, make sure that you are not performing tricks where the execution of your sleight of hands are proficient enough where it cannot be seen from all angles.

(5) Illusions are magic tricks usually involving some disappearing act followed by some reappearance somewhere else. As the name implied, an illusion act is merely an … illusion. Famous acts such as “The Disappearance of the Statue of Liberty” and “Crossing of the Great Wall of China” by David Copperfield are examples of illusions. However, the employment of camera tricks in an illusion is frowned upon by professional magicians.

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